TEMBIA'PO | PROJECTS

Iquebi was hunted, captured and exhibited in public in Asuncion, Paraguay’s capital, as a prey. He then was liberated by Jesuits priests, "christianized",colonized and after 20 years of diaspora went back home to his family and land. This is a story that unfortunately is not alien to most of indigenous cultures. There are similar stories of abuse, displacement and theft by governments and corporations in Canada and around the world. These stories need to be told. The only way to stop the abusers is to denounce and talk about the abuse. The only way that as designers we can decolonize is by creating space for decolonized places.

I shared Iquebi’s story with three wonderful women designers from the Global South and Global North: Marcia Higuchi (Brasil) and Melanie Camman and Professor Dr. Bonne Zabolotney (Canada). These dialogues brought in more reflections and provocations on topics such as white guilt (A.Lorde, 1984), moves to innocence (Tuck and Yang, 2012), white supremacy (M.Lugones,2003), white male dominance. Borderlands (Anzaldua, 2012), Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1996), Sisters solidarity (B.Hooks, 1994), Decolonization (Cusicanqui, 2020), Otherness. 

These words turned into keywords that I presented in a series of cards that I called: Transgressing the Binary, White and Colour’d cards (*) They are meant to provoke more dialogues, reflections in the context of workshops and public settings.These cards can be utilized as a sort of alternative tools to give voice to racialized and marginalized people and as a start point to bring in more stories and realities that need to be told and changed in order to restore our world social and ecological balance

(*) I presented the cards at the "Decolonizing Design Working Group" from the Design Justice Network in Feb 2021